Fedora 21 Could Implement Wayland as the Default Display Server

The developers of Fedora 21 are now discussing whether to adopt Wayland as the display server for the upcoming version of the OS, and this is quite an important decision to make.

Wayland is still under heavy development, but the GNOME developers have been saying for a few months now that they intend to adopt Wayland at some point in the future. The aim was to have it ready for GNOME 3.12, but that got pushed back. The new deadline is for GNOME 3.14, which is still a long way off.

Fedora uses GNOME as the default desktop, so a proposal was made to also adopt Wayland along with GNOME for the next iteration of the Linux distribution.

“This change is targeted at F21. For F20, we aim for having an experimental GNOME shell Wayland compositor available, without necessarily having all the surrounding desktop infrastructure ported. To avoid destabilizing the X compositor, mutter will ship two separate libraries, and gnome-shell will ship two binaries that will link against them. Concretely, we plan to have a separate mutter-wayland package,” reads the proposal on the Fedora wiki.

Given the fact that Fedora releases always stayed true to the GNOME desktop and that the GNOME project is actually using Fedora to demonstrate their progress is a good indication that this proposition will most likely be adopted without any issues.